Isn’t it funny how an entire scene from a film can linger in the mind forever, even after the very name of the film itself has faded from your consciousness? This is especially true of films glimpsed in childhood, particularly those screened on television, in the days before digital TV, with it’s fancy info bars, enabled us to know what we are watching at the mere press of a button. Back in them days, if you caught something halfway through, and didn’t have a Radio Times handy, you might not never find out what it was. Ever.

A friend once told me about a scene from a film he had seen on telly once as a kid. In the scene, a London Underground train pulls into a station, only for everyone waiting on the platform to be absolutely stunned when they see that every inch of the entire train, and every one of it’s passengers, have turned bright yellow! Unfortunately, for reasons similar to those mentioned above, my friend couldn’t remember what the film was in which this scene appeared, but I never forgot about his description of it. It sounded so weird, so creepy, so brilliantly eccentric, that I just had to find out what the film in question was.

Asking fellow film fans yielded no answers, and nor did trawling the internet, but one day I did finally stumble upon what I had been referring to as ”The Film With the Scene in Which All the Passengers of a Tube Train Turn Yellow”; by complete chance and in the most unlikely of places, too.

I - like anybody who considers themself a “proper” film fan should be - am a big fan of the films made in collaboration between British director Michael Powell and his Hungarian producer/writing partner, Emeric Pressburger. Responsible for a handful of the most memorable and widely admired films ever made (The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, A Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes), I am something of a completist when it comes to the duo, and have seen practically everything they ever made. As well as their celebrated masterpieces, Powell and Pressburger also made a fair few curiosities in their time, especially towards the end of their careers. The most obscure film they ever made, arguably, was their final collaboration, a near impossible to find children’s film called The Boy Who Turned Yellow.

It wasn’t until after I’d paid (way, way) over the odds for an ancient VHS copy of The Boy Who Turned Yellow that it began to dawn on me that it just might be the fabled ”Yellow Tube Train” film itself, so it was with great excitement and anticipation that I sat down to watch it for the first time. And, sure enough, that long searched for scene soon appeared in all it’s barmy, eye-popping glory, and well worth the wait it was too! Just as I had pictured it in my mind all that time, the scene perfectly captured the spirit of the sort of inspired, attention-grabbing, oddly psychedelic fare they used to think it was acceptable to show children in the 60s, 70s and 80s, and is now sadly absent from our cinema and TV screens (the frankly mesmerising In the Night Garden being a possible exception).

As for the rest of The Boy Who Turned Yellow, it might be somewhat cruel to say it, but it isn’t really worthy of a place in the Powell/Pressburger canon. A perfectly passable and pleasant children’s film it is (with the magical power of electricity being harnassed to help a truanting schoolboy find his lost mice in the Tower of London… Hang on, that makes it sound amazing), but that one Tube-based flourish of playful, dreamy visual magic aside, a classic it is definitely not. Still, it was made for the worthy and much-missed Children’s Film Foundation, so you can’t really hold it against the great men for giving it a go. The Boy Who Turned Yellow is also comfortably miles better than Powell’s 1969 solo effort, the turgid sex comedy Age of Consent, which is easily the worst film either man ever put his name to.

I couldn’t find the scene in it’s entirety, sadly, but look below and you can glimpse a sizeable portion of it. This is one of those fan-made music video thingys, in which someone edits a film and puts it to music. But as the music here is Stevie Wonder’s ‘Confusion’, we shouldn’t really complain.

You can see the scene I’ve been rabbiting on about right at the very start. Enjoy!

Tags children's film foundation emeric pressburger michael powell scene of the day the boy who turned yellow